This book takes a deep dive into the Sassoon family. The family originated with Sassoon ben Salih, who, along with his family, were the treasurers of the pashas of Baghdad. He had two sons, David and Joseph, who ultimately wound up leaving the area due to political issues. David wound up in Bombay for a while, mixing himself up in the opium trade, and raking in the dough. Despite the fact that he made his money in an unfortunate way, he did a lot of philanthropy work. His drug money built schools, hospitals, and museums, providing jobs and resources for many people. David and Joseph expanded not only their businesses, but their families. Each generation had all kinds of business deals, resulting in the cementing of this family as one of the richest and most influential families of the time. Several members were involved in politics and rubbed elbows with Edward VII, Prince of Wales.

The author of this book, Joseph Sassoon, is a distant relative of the original Sassoon family. He has has a pretty amazing career all on his own. In addition to being an accomplish author, he is currently the director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown University. He is also an associate at St. Antony's College in Oxford. He is fluent in several languages, which helped him in his research into the family, as a lot of documents were in various languages. In addition to learning about this family, I also enjoyed learning about this author. In a time were anti-Jewish sentiment is on the rise and loud, it is nice to be able to support people in the community and learn about different aspects of Jewish history. I have to admit most of my knowledge of Jewish history comes from whatever I have learned as a World War II history major, and not from other sources or people. I am absolutely going to look into more of this type of material, because there is a long, rich history that I am missing out on knowing about. The author did an interview, which I looked up after I finished this book, and one of the things that he said he hoped people would take away from this book is that migrant people are human beings that often leave their homes with next to nothing and fight their way up from the bottom. That is something that a lot of people could do with considering.

This book was amazing. The only Sassoon name that I had ever heard prior to seeing this book was Vidal Sassoon, and, as it turns out, he was only distantly related to the family that this book focuses on. (He was related to them through his father, David Sassoon, who resided in London. His mother was an Ashkenazi Jew, which is also a very neat fact.) I had no idea about the work the members of this family put in to make a name for themselves, and certainly had never heard of the "Rothschilds Of The East" as they were often called. Obviously, the author has a lot of first hand information to go with, but the book was exceptionally well researched. To be a book about family dynasties, it was certainly not dry or tedious to read. I wish that I would have gotten to this book sooner. It was a lot of fun learning about all of these people and the influences they had in business and society that can still be seen today.